Tuesday, May 10, 2011

The Osama treatment

News breaking that missiles have hit Gadaffi's compound in Tripoli. Has President Obama got trigger happy after assassinating Osama bin Laden? Just whack all the mofos with special ops and missiles. Waste them all. In the old days when one local head of state was in dispute with another it was abductions and ransoming as well as battle and famine, now with Google Maps and the tools of globalisation it is little more than remote controlled murder.

An awesome capability despensed with all the care and diligence you would give to choosing a toothpick. That's the impression I get of the US operation.

Those compounds may well contain "human shields," but as the previous administration proved when their opening attack on Iraq was a missile strike in an attempted assassination of Saddam's inner circle in a residential building in Baghdad where many civilians were killed - the US policy is to prefer not to think about the "collatoral damage" and do it anyway. Even if it is a one in ten chance he won't be there and 100 people will die, it is better to take the 10% chance of knocking him out. Rumsfeld and Cheney wouldn't have blinked at 1:1000. In the same way Obama didn't blink when Israel decided to massacre a thousand or so Gaza refugees during the Bush inter-regnum. The US has a very consistent foreign policy across both parties.

The American press are letting Obama off for "double tapping" their collective nemesis. They don't want to ask the questions.

I'm still waiting for the photos - the autopsy/examination notes - something. The world waits. Obama saying they are graphic is no excuse - they can choose whatever image(s) of the many they took. A before and after in slow-mo isn't necessary. I would have expected some shroud wrapped body with an overtly Muslim US soldier with an imam cap on next to it in side3 a helicopter - with the sea as a background. Would that suffice? Maybe not - release something with what was left of his face - there's got to be at least one photo they could release.

It has helped the Americans no end that Al Qaeda themselves have acknowledged his demise, because they have presented no real evidence to substantiate it. We are all expected to believe them. The Americans assert he is dead and assert they chucked his body out of a helicopter into the sea. But without the proof he could have been alive when they biffed him out. He may still be alive - in Guantanamo? Renditioned to a third party? We have to trust the Americans that he is dead.

By releasing video of Osama at his safe house (or should that be the ISI safe house) it proves only that he was alive. So the Americans have proved he was alive, but they still refuse to prove he is dead. This is unsustainable.